Canonical Insights

If the canonical insight of computer science is automating repetition, the canonical insight of data science is optimization. It isn’t that computer scientists haven’t thought about optimization. They have. But computer scientists weren’t the first to think about automation, just like economists weren’t the first to think that incentives matter. Automation is just the canonical, foundational, purpose of computer science.

Similarly, optimization is the canonical, foundational purpose of data science. Data science aims to provide the “optimal” action at time t conditional on what you know. And it aims to do that by learning from data optimally. For instance, if the aim is to separate apples from oranges, the aim of supervised learning is to give the best estimate of whether the fruit is an apple or an orange given data.

For certain kinds of problems, the optimal way to learn from data is not to exploit found data but to learn from new data collected in an optimal way. For instance, randomized inference also us to compare two arbitrary regimes. And say if you want to optimize persuasiveness, you need to continuously experiment with different pitches (the number of dimensions on which pitches can be generated can be a lot), some of which exploit human frailties (which vary by people) and some that will exploit the fact that people need to be pitched the relevant value and that relevant value differs across people.

Once you know the canonical insight of a discipline, it opens up all the problems that can be “solved” by it. It also tells you what kind of platform you need to build to make optimal decisions for that problem. For some tasks, the “platform” may be supervised learning. For other tasks, like ad persuasiveness, it may be a platform that combines supervised learning (for targeting) and experimentation (for optimizing the pitch).